Online games

[PoetryForAnimals]

Can someone explain why 30 min and 45 min are most popular with the people playing public online games?
I have so many problems with the buggy timer and it's sad to spend time on a game and then get kicked out.
Why not put more time and then just play as quickly as possible? (so you are done before time but less vulnerable to lags and timer problems).

Also can someone explain in a little detail how the karma and rank systems work?

Merry Christmas Earthlings :D

[Floydian]

The game suffers heavily from analysis paralysis. It's frustrating to play with someone who takes 2-3 minutes per turn when you're only taking 15-30 seconds.

[chaney]

The game has a wonderful moderate depth of analysis possible. Some people don't like to analyze as much as others. Many people don't enjoy other players analyzing a lot. This creates a mismatch in pace that aggravates many players, so they set a time limit. Some of us are perfectly happy with a 3-4 hour session and find the tough decision making more satisfying.

Also some players will quit if not winning, then the poor software makes everyone else just sit while their time runs out.

How does the karma and rand system work? It doesn't for the most part. It is a dysfunctional source of frustration to many who make the mistake of caring about it. You get karma penalties when the game/network bug, hurray! Sorry, I don't have any detail but it does seem to work for some people, not that they discuss it much.

Merry Christmas regardless of origin!

[PoetryForAnimals]

Floydian - fair enough. I think I'm fairly quick but I will probably never be able to play all turns in 15 seconds with drafting and timer bugs and network errors.

Chaney - thank you for the explanation :D
An online game doesn't necessarily take more than 1-2 hours for me max, but I hate depending on the buggy timer and being thrown out of a game, that I've played seriously because I lacked one minute or two to get to see the results.

[chaney]

Agreed. When I was playing, I played only with patient friends. We set the time limits very high and enjoyed the time to plan without being annoyed by others taking time. Not for everyone obviously. We found TTS a better option, even prior to scripting.

[Panoco]

Then, the problem is timer, not the user's preferences. Timer was pretty reliable until Prelude comes, and as a fast player I wonder for a 20 min one.

The point is not about overcalculating or not, it's about WHEN you do that. As a not-solo game, you have to take care of the other players fun (boardgames usually plays with your friends/family), so try to calculate your actions WHILE the other players are playing, and quickly react when the turn reaches you.

Of course there are a lot of different playstyles and we cannot force everyone to play the same way, we have to respect the preferences of the others, but must to get a balance between optimizing your turns and share the fun with the other (anonymous) players, don't you think? :)

[chaney]

Of course a player should plan ahead while others are taking their turns. Sometimes those plans get dashed. If your plan was to drop a Greenery Tile, elevating Oxygen, enabling you to play a card with an O2 restriction, getting you another Animal tag, which let you get just enough money to play ... etc. etc. etc. that's great. You totally know what you will be doing and can do it really fast.

But what happens if the player before you destroys a couple of your plants? Your entire plan that you spent five minutes finding and checking is no longer possible.

Maybe you thought you had a lot of time to claim a Milestone and planned a great income generating turn, but someone unexpectedly got close to the Milestone so you need to reevaluate.

Of course you can plan more than one turn at a time, 2, 3, 5 contingencies are sometimes easy to plan. But the game is complex enough that sometimes just a single plan takes several minutes to evaluate - in other cases even longer.

If you are happy playing with quick decisions, that's great. You probably are not making the most optimal decisions, which is fine, but not so great for everyone. It takes time to search the "tree" of possible options and outcomes, and to verify that you can execute what you want to. Some of us enjoy playing with others who also like to evaluate the options more completely. For us, this is a more satisfying game and victory is greater, and loss as well. To me, the depth of this game is very good - not too simple and not too complex, accompanied by just enough hidden information to make the "correct" beyond practical reach. To us, short time limits would turn the game into a less satisfying experience. We don't mind waiting - we can figure more plans or just have a conversation about something else.

You play how you want to. Be sensitive to other players' preferences and adjust as you can. If your styles are not compatible with players enjoying the game, it's a bad match. Avoid those.

The best way to play with randomized players who will share compatible styles is to set the timer high or low - this will signal the other players who will only join games they can tolerate.

The timer is surely broken in addition to these issues, and has been for years.